Author: brian

addendum to the danger mouse cd… apparently music activism group downhill battle is organizing a protest in support of the stricken record. grey tuesday is encouraging people all over the net to change their page colors to grey next tuesday the 24th, and join in posting the album to their site for any and all to download. there’s a good wired article regarding the backlash as well in which someone points out very rightly, ‘if it’s so amazing, why doesn’t EMI just sign the guy and make their share of money off this disc everybody already wants to buy?’

so since my site can easily go from black to grey for a day, and i’m not short on bandwidth or webspace these days, why not join the cause? check in next week for a special one-time-only, first-time-in-years color change. too exciting to imagine, i know.

dj danger mouse – the grey album – 4 stars

when i heard about this, i thought, ‘what a great idea, i better pick that up.’ when i heard it was getting banned and ordered all copies destroyed by whichever stores still had stock left, i thought, ‘what a damn shame, it sounded like a great idea and i missed out.’ then when my man tim posted a link to score the whole thing, i thought, ‘i’m not going to feel guilty now if they’re making it physically impossible for me to buy this legitimately . . . right click, save as, muthafucka!’

and that was only a couple days but a couple dozen listens ago. i’m not going to claim full authority on this since i don’t technically own the black or white albums this was drawn from. but i do know this little cd project has just earned a permanent place on my hip hop classics list alongside qbert and soulwax, because when i hear this i just want to party. it’s great. sure, a lot of it’s the strength of the rapping, but the full sound makes it the amount of fun it ends up being. break the law and listen to this if you haven’t already — it’s so worth it.

[now hearing this: the pay day song, change clothes, which even if you can’t be troubled with the rest of the album you should still hear. the breakdown at the end is excellent.]

i had an all-around unbelievable weekend. the addition of presidents day didn’t let me down either, i just had one more unbelievable day. not surprisingly that puts me in a great mood going into today, save for a twinge of regret that i’m back at the desk this morning.

i was going to try avoiding the list form on this, but it ended up looking really long and boring, and besides the pile up of unexpected, uncharacteristic, or just suprising high points of the weekend is more impactful as a list anyway:

i got a free copy of the chris cunningham directors label dvd from work, which i watched with my buddy pat after some in-n-out friday night, and which i am glad to have on my shelf considering his aphex twin videos would both sit comfortably on my top ten all-time music videos list.

i ended up going to a college party with some friends, which i only resigned my initial hesitation toward thanks to my pals skyy vodka and sprite one-liter. the three of us ended up having quite a fun and belligerent time.

while at the party, i ran into a girl who’d also graduated already, who was in one of my advertising classes and who i’d had a crush on but never talked to. she recognized me and gave me her phone number after we talked for a while, which was exciting and personally validating. she turned out to be a little strange though so between that and developments later in the weekend, i’m not sure i will end up calling her. sorry wendy!

saturday morning, i actually got a response to my post regarding indie 103 from the station’s programming director. surreal. crazy that he should end up here, but i am glad to have heard from him. if you’re interested in the exchange, his email and my response are right here.

i had a surprisingly splendid valentines day thanks entirely to my dearest jen; our plan of white wine and lost in translation was perfect, despite our getting drunk and sleepy before quite making it to the end of the movie. we even ended up doing something i’d sort of been wanting to do for ages but just never really found the right time to do . . . fondu. it was a very sexy experience, i must say. jen is the best.

our bar of choice was closed sunday night for some nba all-star related party, so we ended up in the diviest dive bar in hollywood, the powerhouse, where i helped drain my first pitcher of natural ice before we promptly left. then i lost at poker and went home and had a muffin.

i hosted an excellent barbeque monday though to make use of our day off, and it put me in a great mood. except for the moment of slow-motion horror as i dropped a stack of ten frozen burger patties off the side of our balcony, but that quickly passed into laughter. lots of friends came and ate and enjoyed themselves. it’s been too long, need to step up the barbeque frequency around here.

and if you can believe it, i crammed in one last great time afterward, and met up with a new girl. very promising. don’t want to jinx it because i think she’s cute.

[now hearing this: wilco, because their documentary renewed my interest in the album once i finally got around to seeing it.]

feel free to send love notes or leave comments declaring your crush on me. happy valentines.

while the existence of LA’s new radio station ‘indie 103‘ doesn’t exactly qualify as breaking news any longer, i only recently got around to giving it a listen, and i have to say, i’m intrigued yet confused.

their station ID’s proclaiming to be ‘YOUR independent radio’ had me a little curious, as i assumed it to be a clear-channel trick to nab an otherwise anti-radio market niche. and as it turns out i assumed correctly, as explained in this illuminating LA weekly article. but since ‘independent’ and ‘clear-channel-affiliated’ are about as far apart as penguins from santa, i didn’t see how it could be that there is now a radio station that manages not to make me cringe quite all the time. (generally i’m opposed to radio itself because it doesn’t come with a button allowing you to skip to the next song if this one doesn’t do it for you at that moment, and radio hasn’t introduced me to anything new since junior high).

as the article tells, apparently CC only deals in ad space and the former owners of that frequency (entravision, a hispanic/dance station) hired someone to do the programming who is not directed by the Man himself. now we have a station where i have heard cursive’s ‘art is hard’ played on city-wide fm radio on multiple occasions? i certainly won’t complain about that. do i find it sort of weird that indie is a demographic now? of course. does it make sense that for some reason heavy rotation of the beastie boys’ back catalog of non-singles has been deemed part of the indie canon for the purpose of this radio station? no, not at all, but i’ve heard at least one track on each of the several drives i’ve opted for indie 103 over ipod for curiosity’s sake, and i usually just laugh and bear with them — i guess they’re just learning.

my only complaint is that if they really want this to work, they better step it up a notch, you know? say, with actual dj’s and/or a website with any information whatsoever. they’re making it pretty plain that the station’s certainly not a mechanism for helping indie artists or labels, what with the whopping twelve singles actually named by artist/track on their website and absolute lack of song ID on the air at any time. but maybe if on the next nielsen survey there’s even the slightest bump, i guess this could be the first step in the right direction.

[and as a post-script to non-angelean readers — is this a phenomena occurring anywhere else in the US right now, with the seemingly paradoxical ‘indie radio’? or am i being test-marketed to as we speak?]

****additionally, you can listen to a stream and make your own judgments, if you care.

the weeks of working late nights seem to have died down for the moment, and the snowboard trip this last weekend was a blast. got to escape LA for some cold mountain air and snow, do some free drinking and boarding — i even managed to stay on my feet save for only a few tumbles. can’t say i didn’t find leaving work friday with coworkers, spending two days with them, then coming back to work sunday to do more work for a monday meeting all a little strange, like i didn’t even really have a weekend, but it was definitely worth it. as was maybe sleeping a total of 6 solid hours between the two nights. we all had a ton of fun and it was worth the exhaustion.

feeling a little uninspired though blog-wise. not that i’m bored and not doing anything, just that what i’m doing doesn’t seem to be very anecdotal. can only write so many times, ‘working late, going out for drinks, reading books — happy, basically,’ because that more or less sums things up lately, it seems. i’m excited about the coming presidents’ weekend and the extra sleeping and lounging that will accompany. i’m looking forward to a non-valentines day evening with jen where we will celebrate our mutual misfortunes in love with wine and cinema and probably a large dose of complaining about not finding anyone to fill our respective romantic needs.

which begs an update: new years resolutions have gone okay, seeing girls and all. although technically successful, no sparks are flying anywhere, however, and i’m in no danger of having an exciting new belle. looks like that means putting some effort forward once more this month and going a new direction. and dammit, that’s going to mean more work. maybe i need to start listening to ‘eye of the tiger’ more, but i feel like my whole outlook needs a little more firing up. everything’s just been ‘pretty good’ lately and i haven’t been jazzed in a while. perhaps i should start a nice coffee/cocaine habit?

definitely need something though. a jolt. a kick-start. i’ll let you know when i find it.

bad blogging lately because i’ve been busy nonstop at work this week. at least i get to go on a free snowboarding trip to mammoth this weekend through some work people too (eat it!). that means i won’t be sitting at home catching up on posting though either, so i thought i’d just share this picture with you. part of me wanted to go off inventing all the funny scenarios suggested by this spray-painted sign — who is hat man? who is his frustrated, trash-hating rival? and what kind of hat are we talking here? — but aside from not having the time to do that either, it’s almost funnier to leave it all a mystery.

(suggestions can be emailed or left in the comments until i get back to a less busy week and can do some better posting of my own).

post-script to that last one: i have to make ted leo the pay day song as well, because for some reason i never realized what a strong track biomusicology was until at this very show. it really hits hard though so i’m glad i finally learned my lesson.

and in other music-related avenues, does anyone have my copy of elliott smith’s XO? i was going to put it on the other day and can’t find it, so i’m assuming i either have a very precise thief or i loaned it out and forgot to whom. i guess i could just burn a copy from my itunes at work where i have it copied, but i have a strong distaste for CD-R’s compared to actual packaging. any info leading to the successful return will be rewarded.

not that it won’t receive enough coverage elsewhere, but all i’m saying is, why janet? both the songs she sang were old, she’s not really hot anymore as far as celebrity buzz goes, and only quasi-hot physically but with a nice dose of scary. why couldn’t she have ‘introduced’ the show, and then had jessica simpson be the one dancing with justin at the end? it’s not as if i think she’s the hottest thing around and that would have let me die a happier man, but i’m sure it would have been preferable to most males tuned in to the event. with janet i just laughed mostly.

regarding more tasteful performances though: ted leo at the echo on friday. can you say perfect? well, maybe not perfect because the echo could use a bit better sound so they don’t have to compensate by just turning up the mid-quality system up to a higher volume. otherwise though, outstanding. played my favorite songs except for gold finch and red oak tree. stove by a whale for the encore was just what i wanted. oh, and i missed the fourth and female pharmacist — perhaps she was home sick or sitting this tour out to spend valentine’s with a special someone? — so i guess it could have been slightly better, but really it didn’t need to be better than it was.

back to the super bowl real quick: if you need some home-made mozzarella sticks at any point in your life, call up me and mike and ted because we had that shit down on sunday. they were delicious and gorgeous and probably better than any from your various american food diners, so of course we ate like 10 each and couldn’t really move after combining those with a pound each of nacho cheese. i think i can hear my heart and arteries crying this morning, but let them weep, it was soooooo worth it.

my most exciting stories for this week are that i watched 5 episodes of the shield on dvd in one night, easy rider isn’t a very good movie if you’re not a hippy, and today, in a daring trans-national tastebud temptation, i had chicago-style deep dish pizza for lunch followed by some floppy new york-style pizza for dinner. living on the edge? well, working late, actually.

so i’ll steal a story from a few weeks ago i’ve been meaning to give justice. see, down the hall from my apartment lives a very minor celebrity you may have seen and shortly afterward forgotten about in that jerry seinfeld movie. frankly, i can’t say, because i haven’t seen it. my friends tell me he wasn’t very funny though, this guy.

anyway, he put one of those cardboard skeletons with rotating posable joints on his door for halloween way back when, in what i thought at the time to be an admirable zest for the season. maybe he’s going to do this for every holiday? maybe he has some personality, unlike most of the people here who seem to constantly ignore any attempts at jest when we share an elevator ride. maybe he’s a cool guy.

well halloween came and went. as did thanksgiving, christmas, and new year’s day. every day the elevator doors opened and across the hallway there was that silly thing still ‘waving’ at me. was there something sinister at work here, or was this just the laziest display of holiday cheer i’d ever seen?

so one day earlier this month, while my buddy dominic was staying over and i was feeling saucy, i figured i’d at least make a little update to the display for the new year — to keep it fresh, you know? i figured hey, this guy’s a comedian; he’ll either appreciate the joke and leave it up, or chuckle and say to himself, ‘all right, they got me’ and take it down. below is a picture of dom and gino posing next to the old bag of bones, and a close up shot of my addition.

he took it down a few days later.

aren’t you glad i have a digital camera now? time for some max payne.

[now hearing this: the shins, again. i think i have a problem. if i keep listening to this cd as much as i have been, i’m going to get SHINS SPLINTS! oh my god, i couldn’t resist that one.]